Hope

'Tis the season of hope, in many ways.  The Christmas season shows us the hope that people are willing to have--hope that love can dominate our lives, that we can find peaceful methods to use and paths to walk on, that we can exist together in harmony in the spirit of unity.  Of course, most of these hopes have not come to fruition on a global scale, but we can reach them more easily on an individual level if we allow ourselves to follow those hopes and do what we can to make them come true.

Why is Christmas the season of hope?  Perhaps it's because a child from humble beginnings was able to teach so many people about the importance of their own lives, about the ways of love, about the true power that people have to affect their own lives by sharing love and compassion with one another.  After all, "love one another" was one of his greatest messages, and one of his most dominant.

I believe very strongly that if we're to have hope, it must be firmly grounded in love.  I may hope that my life will change if I work to make it change, but if I'm not sharing love in my life, will any changes be worthwhile?  If I hope for a better life and I get a higher-paying job, have my hopes come true if I'm also now dealing with unbearable amounts of stress and I'm no longer able to spend quality time with my family?  Sometimes we allow outside indicators like money tell us that our hopes have been realized, but it seems to me that if a hope comes true and lowers the quality of our lives, then it wasn't the best thing to hope for, after all.

So that gives us a second element of hope that's important, and it's the subject of a very common saying in English--"be careful of what you hope for" (aka, "be careful of what you wish for").

In my life, I've hoped for a lot of things.  Most of them haven't come to pass, like peace in our times, like better living conditions for people in this world (and in this country, even), like an end to the partisan bickering that keeps our elected officials from accomplishing positive things that they were elected to accomplish (infrastructure, anyone?).  In fact, many of these things have gotten worse, so my hopes have been dashed over and over.

And in my own rather powerless state as a teacher, my own contributions to bringing these hopes to fruition have been rather minimal--I've cast my votes, I've shared my opinions and thoughts, I've donated to what I've believed to be worthy causes--and it seems rather ineffective, given the success rate of my hopes.

But that said, my entire profession of teaching is based on hope, isn't it?  I teach certain things to 14-year-olds or 19-year-olds with the hope that those things will be relevant and useful to them--and the rest of the world--their while lives long.  I hope that what I teach may help them to craft wonderful lives out of the situations and gifts that they've been given.  I see very little effect of my teachings in the short term--my hope is that the long-term effects will be worthwhile, and that they'll affect my students and the other people in their lives, in positive ways.

We do need to distinguish between wishes and hopes, of course.  If I say in a casual way that I hope you have a good weekend, then I'm basically saying, "I wish you a nice weekend."  On the other hand, if you're going through difficult times and you're incredibly stressed out and you need some rest and rejuvenation, then I most definitely can hope that your weekend is a good one for you, in all ways.

Sometimes it's hard to be a hopeful person when we so many bad things going on in the world, so many people treating each other horridly.  Many of us seem to be content to hope that the bad things don't happen to us, and that the bad people don't come into our lives.  But we can also hope that these bad things stop happening to others, too, and with that hope we can practice spreading love--for it's a well-known truth that people who feel loved are also more likely to feel hope, for they have a reference point in their lives (the love) that tells them that their hopes aren't wasted time or effort.

What do you hope for?  Peace on earth?  Then practice peace with your neighbors and loved ones.  Fair treatment for all?  Then treat everyone fairly.  More opportunities for all?  Then help the young people in your life to develop skills and talents that will open the doors to more opportunities for them.  We can work towards what we hope for.  We can't always see the positive effects of our efforts because sometimes they take years to manifest themselves, but if we know that we're contributing to the love in this world, our efforts will be worthwhile whether we see our hopes coming closer to fruition or not.

Perhaps during this Christmas season, it would be nice to take a bit of time and reflect upon our own hopes--what do we hope, and why do we hope these things?  And we can see in the hopes of the season--especially the "peace on earth, goodwill towards all" part--just how important hope is to us, and just how nice it may be to be working our ways towards the hope that is a tremendous part of ourselves.  Let's let that hope out of the deep recesses where we store it and allow it to affect our words, our thoughts, and our actions.

Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion
for the possible.

William Sloan Coffin, Jr.

http://livinglifefully.com/hope.html